Category: Technology and Social Media

As we all become increasingly addicted to online streaming services like Netflix and Amazon’s Prime, it’s a good time to review the Internet Service Providers that provide us with the ability to binge watch 20 episodes of The Good Wife in an evening, or (heaven forbid!) download the two most recent seasons of Game of Thrones. Is there a difference between them other than price? Do we have an actual “choice” when it comes to who delivers us our evening’s entertainment of hatewatching Scandal, or worse, Riverdale?

I like to do most of my personal shopping online, especially during the holidays. It saves me fighting my way through crowds at the mall. However, my biggest annoyance is when I visit a website, look at a product and close my browsers, the next time that I log in and use a search engine like Google, I see an ad for that company. In some cases, that specific product I was looking at still shows up. This is because some companies use “Remarketing Advertising” or “Targeted Advertising” based your your browser/device history. This is done by tracking the products you visit and then showing you ads for it later. However, there are ways to stop this and I will explain how to stop ads based on your web history.

The fastest kind of website is one with static content, without images and saved to a single file, like an HTML page.
However, this solution is not scalable since it is not easy to change content over time nor is it visibly appealing, since everyone loves to look at pictures not just text.

Like all household or office moves, converting a website or blog from one platform to another can be a daunting task. However with the right tools and steps, it is very easy to migrate from Movable Type to WordPress.

Deleting your social network accounts from the internet, or simply choosing to have less of an online presence, can be a difficult task. The first step is deciding which accounts you want to close down (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc). The second (and most time consuming) step is finding where to do it.

Webnames.ca President and Co-Founder Cybele Negris’ new article, “5 Social MediaTools That Can Save You and Your Business Time” is now available on Business in Vancouver. In this article, she talks about tools that can increase productivity and save time for small business owners.

Small business owners and executives are on tight schedules, making it difficult to interact with colleagues and your customer base. With the growing significance and functionalities of different social media tools, business owners and executives can use these tools to interact with customer while staying productive.

We’re excited to announce that our Business in Vancouver campaign has just become even more interesting! The March 12th, 2013 issue features Layar capabilities which allows you to interact with our ad on page 16!

After largely ignoring the search function at the top of the Facebook interface for years, the social media giant is finally implementing improvements to its search function. On January 15, Facebook unveiled Graph Search.

CIRA‘s latest Cyber Security Tip Sheet is about Mobile Devices. Our mobile devices have become such an integral part of our lives. With the constant technological innovations being introduced in the market, may of us assume that our devices have greater security and privacy capabilities compared to laptops and desktops. As a result, we start exercising less caution when using our phones, which can lead to serious security and privacy issues.

CIRA’s latest Cyber Security Consumer Tip Sheet is about Socializing and Interacting Online. The majority of people use the Internet as a source to keep in touch with family and friends. Not all our online experiences are positive though.The tip sheet goes over the main issues you can face online when socializing and tips to deal with these problems such as:

Identity Theft

Any time you add personal details to your online profile, there is the risk that a scammer may steal them. Though many may seem innocuous, it may only take a few details–your full name and your full date of birth, for instance–to open the door to your online accounts. As well, if your status updates aren’t kept private scammers may watch them to gather details that will let them guess your password or your security question.

Yesterday, Hootsuite released a convenient add-on for the Hootlet extension, called AutoSchedule. This add-on enables the user to queue multiple tweets automatically and determine the best time to schedule posts based on your social activity and followers. You are able to maximize your reach without swamping your audience.

What is Hootlet?For anyone who has not heard of this browser extension, Hootsuite released Hootlet back in 2009 and is a neat browser add-on that can save you time when composing posts to send out through Twitter and Facebook. It offers a much easier way to share links through Hootsuite, especially when you are researching content to post on Twitter. When you are on an article that you would like to share, you’d simply click on the Hootlet button on your browser’s toolbar, and a separate dialog box will appear with the tweet already set up with the title of the article or page and the site URL shortened.

On Wednesday June 6th, the security passwords of 6.5 million LinkedIn users were compromised. A Russian hacker had stolen encrypted passwords and posted them online, read more in this related article on Mashable.com.

The support staff here at Webnames.ca has witnessed first hand the rise of WordPress’ popularity over the last few years. More and more, customers are asking if our hosting plans support WordPress, wanting to know how to install it, or even just wanting to know whether we think WordPress is the right solution for their website needs. Last summer, Webnames.ca introduced its FastTrack web design service, which uses WordPress as the platform to build the site. At first glance, one might think that Webnames.ca decided to do this simply because WordPress is “popular”. After all, as of December 2011, WordPress 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times, and has surpassed giants like Joomla and Drupal in the arena of popular content management systems (CMS).

There was a time when Microsoft could dominate any space they set their sights on. Time and again they would play catch up and leverage their operating system hegemony to dominate particular market segments. They did this most successfully with Microsoft Office Suite. Like most people at the time I really liked Lotus 123, WordPerfect and dBase which dominated their respective spaces under the pre-Windows DOS operating system. When Microsoft launched Windows perhaps it wasn’t a huge surprise that early versions of Word, Excel and FoxPro/Access worked much better and it wasn’t long before they dominated their segments.
When MS realized that they had all but missed the boat with the internet and infamously bundled Internet Explorer with their operating system, they got into legal trouble with the US government for monopoly practices. Microsoft was found to have abused its monopoly position by attempting reduce Navigator’s usage share by giving IE away, among other things. It still didn’t save Netscape however.

CIRA has recently reported a phishing attack that is targeting .CA registrants by email and using images from the CIRA website. If you do receive an email from CIRA asking for any type of payment, please disregard it, as CIRA will never ask you for any type of payment.